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By Austin Sarat / Original to ScheerPost
Almost 40 years ago, a pop song rocketed toward the top of the charts with a lyric that seems especially relevant today: “Don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone,” might well be the anthem for life in the Trump era.
In many spheres, that line might well be the anthem for the first year of the president’s second term. Academic freedom is one of the most important of those spheres.
Threats to academic freedom were well-documented last year. Among them were the Trump Administration’s attacks on universities including Harvard and Columbia, new laws curbing what faculty at public universities can teach, and the willingness of students to act as “informants” on professors when they disapproved of what those teachers said in their classes.
What has been less well documented is the reawakening and renewed commitment to protecting academic freedom. That has happened on campuses and in courts across the country.
In one of the most important judicial endorsements of academic freedom in 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in December sided with a University of Washington instructor after university officials warned him that a statement on his course syllabus likely violated policy and threatened to discipline him in the future if he again included it. The significance of this decision is not just in its result, but, more important, its clear and forceful articulation of the value of academic freedom itself.
Before saying more about that decision, I suggest that colleges and universities now have an opportunity to build on renewed awareness of the importance of academic freedom by revising and adapting their commitments to it to address the new challenges that emerged in 2025. Among the things they should do, two of the most important are providing new protections to faculty who are directly targeted by the government or outside groups, enlisting students to support academic freedom in the schools where they study, and asking alumni to support those efforts.
Among positive developments last year in the domain of academic freedom was the growth in membership in and support for the American Association of University Professors, the leading advocate for academic freedom in the country. Nationally, membership grew from about 40,000 members at the start of 2025 to about 50,000 members at year’s end, and membership in local AAUP chapters also spiked.
In addition, the AAUP brought or joined numerous lawsuits against the Trump Administration to resist its assault on academic freedom. Among them, last summer, it joined a group of Jewish scholars and students to intervene in a lawsuit in which the Trump administration sued the University of Pennsylvania to force it to disclose private information of its Jewish faculty and students.
As the AAUP explained in a news release, “We argued that the EEOC’s request infringes on the rights of Jewish members to free association… identity. Even further, the subpoena threatens the safety, privacy, and academic freedom of Jewish people at Penn.”
In another case, the AAUP and Harvard won a victory last September when a federal judge ruled that “the Trump administration violated the Constitution, the Civil Rights Act and the Administrative Procedures Act by demanding that Harvard restrict speech and restructure core operations or see face the cancellation of billions in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospital.”
As Judge Allison Burroughs put it, “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,”
Also in September, the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association won another court victory, stopping the Trump Administration from carrying out mass arrests and deportations of “noncitizen students and faculty members for ideological reasons.”
In addition to the AAUP’s new and aggressive defense of academic freedom, 2025 witnessed important efforts to explain its value in new and different ways.
In one of the most important of those efforts, my colleague, Adam Sitze, argued that academic freedom is “neither the privilege of an elite guild nor an expression of raison d’état. It’s one among many forms of counter-majoritarianism that a democratic republic needs to preserve the common good while guarding against mob rule and autocratic assaults on vulnerable minorities.”
“The common good,” Sitze observed, “can only be discovered and known on the basis of patient, ongoing and pluralistic inquiry….(T)he common good requires liberty: It depends on the free search for truth and its free exposition.”
And he noted, “Tyrants hate truth. Truth’s compelling and imperative quality presents the tyrant with a coercive force that’s stronger and more durable than their own appetite, whim and will. Tyrants hate scholars for the same reason: The scholar, who is the embodiment of truth’s compelling and imperative quality, is an intolerable reminder to tyrants that some things are forever beyond their coercive commands.”
This brings us back to the Ninth Circuit decision. The case arose from the University of Washington’s response to student complaints that their professor did not include a land acknowledgment in the syllabus and instead included a parody of the recommended language.
At first glance, the court’s decision appears to be a conventional defense of academic freedom, with repeated references to the value of the marketplace of ideas in higher education. But it is much more than that.
It engages, as few other court decisions have, with the threat to academic freedom posed when students are offended or upset by what they read or see and complain to university administrators. As the court explained, “If student anxiety or outrage towards a professor’s academic speech could justify restricting what a professor says….(it) Would cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom and the tides of popular campus sentiment would drown out dissenting viewpoints with the adverse reactions of students …”
“This,” the court continued, “would be contrary to long-established First Amendment precedents, which protect academic freedom to promote the development of ideas and expose students to a range of views.” But it didn’t stop there.
The Ninth Circuit advanced a conception of academic freedom’s value, similar to the one Sitze espouses.
Without using the language of the common good, the court explained that academic freedom serves the wider society by being “a primary generator and repository of ideas, a place where unfettered academic debate and open discourse promotes the search for truth and prepares students for a discordant world lacking in orthodoxy.”
Assaults on academic freedom “imperil future generations who must be exposed to a range of ideas and readied for the disharmony of a democratic society.” And the court insisted that “the nation’s future” depends upon the survival of academic freedom.
No other interest, including the university’s interest in creating a diverse and inclusive community, is as compelling.
So perhaps 2025’s profound and ominous threats to academic freedom have had an upside. The prospect of not having what we have long taken for granted has rallied the troops, offered academics and judges an occasion to articulate academic freedom’s value in new ways, and prompted a clearer appreciation of its value in the face of a rising threat of tyranny.
As Adam Sitze puts it, “The scholar, who is the embodiment of truth’s compelling and imperative quality, is an intolerable reminder to tyrants that some things are forever beyond their coercive commands.”
Let’s take that understanding as inspiration as we confront threats to academic freedom that await us in the future.
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Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.